I am currently a member of three scrutiny committees, they are the Neighbourhood Services Committee, Children and Young People and the Licensing Committee. Most Committees meet on a monthly basis but can split up into smaller working groups that meet up more regularly to discuss certain issues. The Neighbourhood Services Committee is responsible for making sure that the Council is providing effective services to the public. These services range from Streetscene (refuse collection, street cleaning, maintaining parks and cemeteries etc), to housing and community safety. Since joining this committee I have been involved with several smaller review groups looking into how the council copes with flooding problems, also looking into how we can improve our litter and street cleaning services. I find the Children and Young People Committee particularly interesting as it looks into every service that affects the lives of the children and young people of our town, this includes everything from education to the Youth Service. The licensing Committee can be very busy and time consuming, it makes sure that everyone that needs a license for a particular activity is operating within the law. People need to apply for a license for a variety of reasons ranging from driving a taxi to running a pub, it’s the Licensing Committees duty to make sure that these people are qualified and safe to do the job.

The only typical thing about my day is that it always starts with getting the kids up and ready for school, none of us really like mornings so this can be a bit of a challenge. My eight year old daughter Ellie is in year four at St. Augustines, and my seventeen year old son Theo is in the sixth form at Carmel. On a good day Theo will make his own way to school and I will walk with Ellie to her school, on a bad day we will get up slightly too late and I end up having to drop them both off in the car! Being a househusband means that it’s my job to to look after the day to day running of our home, this includes cooking, cleaning, ironing and making sure that the kids get safely to and from school. My wife Ruth has a very busy job as a teacher at St. George’s Primary School in Middleton St. George. I know it’s not everyones idea of fun but it was my choice to become a househusband and I really enjoy looking after my family. I fit my role as a househusband around my council work and it seems to work quite well, I also work one day per week with children in a primary school near Sunderland. The only problem is that if I have a day full of council meetings then my work at home gets neglected, this usually means that I have to catch up later in the day. It’s not unusual to find me ironing at midnight or cooking a meal for the following day. I love cooking and I like to experiment with new recipes and try them out on my family, some are more successful than others. I recently made a Thai curry that was so hot that it almost blew my son’s eye brows off!!, My wife and daughter couldn’t eat it.

I think that it is a big problem that some children and young people fall into the trap of thinking that it’s not cool to work hard and to do well at school. I would like to see this way of thinking turned round so that they can be proud of their achievements however big or small. Darlington has got a very good education system and it saddens me to see some young people not taking advantage of it because they feel that there is no point. Not everyone is going to be able to go to university but I truly believe that everybody can be good at something and we need to find ways of helping them to realise this.